In every second case, your own employees chat for cash
Industrial espionage is becoming more and more of a problem, especially for medium-sized companies - and in almost half of the cases, your own employees are the spies. The nationwide commercial detective agency Lentz warns of this http://lentz-detektei.de . Globalization and increased competition are leading to a rapid increase in spying attacks. According to a survey, hacker crime and betrayal of secrets in German companies cause damage of around 4,2 billion euros every year
Betrayal: money lowers inhibitions (Photo: lentz-detektei.de)
Spies from China are the exception
"Every entrepreneur should be on their guard, because it can be a big loss, even for a small company, if their valuable knowledge ends up with the competition," emphasizes Frances Lentz, managing director of the Hanau detective agency. "And the longer a company is spied on unnoticed, the greater the damage." Most of them associate the key word industrial espionage with the theft of information via the Internet or data spies from China. Such cases tend to be the exception, she explains.
Far more often, the "leak" is in your own ranks. Even if many entrepreneurs would not dream of the fact that their company could also be a target. In the past few years, Lentz had to deal with more and more cases in which its own employees acted as "moles" for competitors. She reports on an advertising agency from Augsburg, where the owner kept coming off badly when it came to tenders.
Old study ropes as a danger
"Instead, a competitor prevailed - with almost identical concepts, but a lower price. These are very typical signs of betrayal," explains Lentz. In the end it turned out that a project manager knew the creative director of the competing company from his student days and had collected hefty sums of money for his "tips". "Unfortunately, such processes are more common than many people think," she emphasizes. According to the "Industrial Espionage 2012" study, 47,8 percent of industrial espionage cases can be traced back to unfaithful employees.
More than half of all German companies have been victims of industrial espionage at some point, especially medium-sized companies. Often the betrayal is only noticeable when a number of customers drop out. "Our experience shows that there is usually a lot of worrying evidence, but there is no evidence to act," reports Lentz. Your employees therefore often investigate over several days before they can track down a mole and document its activities in such a way that the evidence can also stand up in court.
(ck)
.